Announced one year ago was KDE Internet of Things “Kiot” with an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation. Development on Kiot sadly fell through the cracks for most of the year but development on it recently restarted.
KDE developer David Edmundson shared that Kiot development has recently been restarted thanks to contributions from new developer Odd Østlie. Odd has been working on new features around Bluetooth, audio device handling, battery state handling for different devices, media mplayer / MPRIS connection, and more.
Cool. It sounds like Homekit but open
Home Assistant is, but KIoT is a way to integrate your computer into HA
I’m confused. What does KDE have to do with HA?
I was also curious, so I looked it up. This was the motivation for developing kiot:
I have a script lower my blinds if I turn on the camera during the afternoon as otherwise there’s an annoying glare. My office lights and monitor both have a redder hue at night, but disabling night-mode on my PC automatically disables the main light performing redshift too. I want my screen to turn off not 10 minutes after activity, which is simultaneously both annoyingly too long and too short, but the moment the motion sensor in my room says I’ve left.
It lets you control various light/sound aspects of your computer via HA. Here’s what it lets you control.
Yeah, the computer locking thing is what I’m definitely going to enable. I have an automation that automatically dims and brightens lights based on the media playing state on my TV, I’d love to do that with my computer as well.
This should be super cool, can’t wait
Whoa, okay that is pretty cool.
Super neat, when I had Windows, I had it so that when a Teams call started it set my room lights to a nice ambient, and turned on a ring light, as well as turned on a icon on my dashboard that let me partner know I was in a call in the office.
FTA
… an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation
Yes I did read that. What kind of integration? And why would you want such a thing?
An integration I have is that when my Webcam gets turned on, the curtains behind me close automatically and a light turns on so people can actually see me.
The main idea is that the state of your computer/desktop is known to home assistant and you can react to it. Media starts playing on PC, so mute the tv. A meeting starts (camera in use), so dim room lights and turn on the ring light.
PC turned off: wait 30s, then turn off the whole outlet to act as a master/slave power strip and save power on monitors and otherpc associated standby devices. Or just turn off desk lights.
Finally you can have scripts on the PC that do whatever you want, and you can trigger them from home assistant. Movement detected in the garden, so open the camera preview on the corner of 3rd monitor. Backup server just came online (or was woken up by wake-on-lan from ha), so run a backup if the PC is on.
I would love to make a dashboard with something other than html. My house dashboard is slow, and I’m hoping that things can be better. Only time will tell.
Why wouldn’t you? Desktop integration with your home. Perhaps HA can use that big GPU of yours for local LLM type stuff?
Why wouldn’t you?
This integration will likely require some level of effort to get working, and what benefit do you get from that that you can’t get from opening the application in a window?
Perhaps HA can use that big GPU of yours for local LLM type stuff?
…huh? HA is typically run on a server. If you want to use your GPU to perpetuate AI disinformation, you can plug it into the server. But KDE is a workstation product…
Use your imagination is my advice. Plenty of programmes blur client/server boundaries and workstation roles. Desktop envs are very capable and wired into huge amounts of your machine
